Juanita
>Dear Coby.
>
>I liked your posting about SVS type schools vs unschooling. I also think
>that no matter how democratic a family is it is a too small unit for children
>to grow up in. I believe that they need an "outside the family community" to
>belong to as well as to the family. The old villages in the non-western
>world provided just that and here in the west we are obliged to create a
>psuedo village for them and call it a school. The children get to belong to
>a family and to a community which hopefully is in harmony with the family but
>which is separate from them. It provides kids for a place of their own to
>make relationships, to observe people of all ages, to learn skills that are
>not the family's skills such as carpentry or putting on make-up ( skills that
>my children enjoyed acquiring in the school), and above all it is a place in
>which they can make mistakes in privacy from their parents. (staff kids
>don't get the latter and it's really bad for them).
>
>Hanna from SVS